Though the world is reopening, advisors are not likely going back to normal in our work lives, says the chief at one high-net-worth Chicago RIA firm.
The advice industry, like the rest of society, has changed irretrievably since the Covid-19 crisis began. Clients will want to work with their advisors differently from now on, as well as advisors, staffs and executives. We’re likely not going back to the old way of doing things, says Rebekah Kohmescher, the chief executive officer at Chicago’s Altair Advisers, and those firms willing to think differently about it will thrive.
“I actually think we have a once-in-a-generation, a one-in-a-hundred-year opportunity to rethink the way work happens and where it happens,” she said in a webinar at the BNY Mellon Pershing INSITE 21 conference.
The webinar, entitled “Advisor Firm of 2030,” posed the question this way: If the industry is so much different now than it was in 2011, what is it likely to look like 10 years from now, especially after a year in which everyone is working from home and tech spending by firms has accelerated?
Kohmescher spoke with Ben Harrison, the co-head of wealth solutions at BNY Mellon Pershing, who asked audience members what they imagined their firms would look like in 10 years.
Kohmescher said her firm has been fully remote for a year, and Altair is experimenting with letting different groups continue to work from home. There is no reason to keep old dynamics going, she said.
“We’re in downtown Chicago, so [Covid] has been very real here. We’ve been fully remote. And instead of just coming out and saying ‘We used to come to the office five days. Everyone [now] come four days. That sounds good.’ That is not an Altair approach to a next step. … I don’t think 100% remote for everyone is best and I don’t think five days a week, which I think is excessive, in the office is right for everyone.”
Instead, she says the firm’s new operation is a work-in-progress, with core groups coming in to the office according to the ways they interact. “Every group is very different. And it’s all about how do they serve each other and our clients well. It’s not about the personality of the manager and their current preference for having people in the office or having people remote.”
The old model—in which a manager has to see the staffer doing the work in person—is going to look old-fashioned, she said. She compared it more to babysitting than managing.
The changes in technology are likely going to intersect with changes in staffing and expectations. Advisors aren’t going to ask the planning programs to think for them or interact with clients, Kohmescher said. Instead, the tech is going to change the way the client interactions happen with the different kinds of advisor specialties.
“I’m really focused on the internal tech within my firm,” she said. “How do I institutionalize all the information an advisor knows about a client so that every person on that team … touches the client [and] knows everything the advisor knows. If you can’t do that, you can’t serve a growing base of clients well. And they’re not really clients of the firm, they’re clients of the advisor and I’m trying to shift that dynamic.
“From a client perspective, what I think is happening already as the world sort of returns to normal and what I hope will happen is that perhaps the business part of our relationship—the investment review, the financial planning review—might happen right on Zoom. And we could perhaps separate the relationship-building part of it altogether. Get it off a quarterly cycle of investment returns. Go and play golf and have dinner and don’t bring any materials. Just talk to the client about what they care about.”
The benefit of tech, in other words, is that it’s going to allow advisors of the future to change up the old calendars and use their time efficiently—so it’s not going to be about having business meetings three weeks after the quarter ends. “That’s just not sustainable,” she said.
Altair was launched by a group of former Arthur Andersen veterans in 2002 after the accounting firm foundered in the wake of the Enron scandal. The firm has $6 billion under management and works with 400 families, Kohmescher said.